Thoughts on a Sunday Morning

"Rejoice in the Lord always; and again I say, rejoice.  Let your gentleness and consideration be known to all, for the Lord is always near.  Do not be anxious about anything.  But with prayer, and by supplication, and with thanksgiving, let your needs be made known unto God.  And the peace of the Lord, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds, in Christ Jesus." 

Philippians 4:4-7 

 

 "The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age.  His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words.  During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, 'Little children, love one another.'   The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, 'Teacher, why do you always say this?'  He replied with a line worthy of John: 'Because it is the Lord's commandment, and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.'" 

Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, 4th century 

 

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.  Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in His own Person restored the image of God in all.   Through our relationship with the Incarnation we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our familiality with all mankind." 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

 

"I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing, or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation. And I have learned to be thankful, whether empty or full." 

Phillipians 4:11-12

 

Remember us, O Lord, in thy loving kindness and tender mercies, as ever they have been from old." 

Psalm 25:6

 

"Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.  Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.  Without love, deeds, even the greatest, count as nothing.  Our Lord's love shines forth as much in the simplest of souls as it does in the most highly gifted, as long as there is no refusal of His grace."

Thérèse Martin de Lisieux

 

These are the three great gifts:  repentance, forgiveness, thankfulness.

 

Dürer, Saint Jerome In His Study

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sloppy Trade for an Options Expiration - Thanksgiving in Sight

 

"When a man takes an oath, he is holding his own self in his own hands, like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he need not hope to find himself again." 

Thomas More 

 

"Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us." 

 Chalmers Johnson 

 

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought." John Kenneth Galbraith 

 

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” 

Søren Kierkegaard

 

Stocks attempted to rally but went out on the lows. 

Gold and silver rallied, but then gave some of it back in the afternoon. 

Let's see if their support holds next week.

Today was a stock option expiration, and the market action seemed to be heavily influenced by that.

Next week is the December contract metals option expiration on the Comex. 

Have a pleasant weekend. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Scams and Shenanigans

 

"The government is the potent omnipresent teacher.  For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example.  Crime is contagious.  If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." 

Louis D. Brandeis 

 

“Hate obscures all distinctions.” 

C. S. Lewis 

 

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” 

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

 

Stocks were slumping today on the bleaker news about the Covid, but managed to turn it around and finish higher into the close.  

Gold and silver dipped once again, and seemed to find a footing along an established point of support on the charts. 

Look at the chart and see what happened around the last big expiration. 

Let's see how well the miners and metals make it through the option expiration tomorrow, and the Comex metals option expiration next week. 

A little physical gold managed to flow into the Hong Kong warehouses, taking the inventories up from abysmal to merely inadequate. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - History Lessons Unlearned - Stock Option Expiration on Friday

 

"The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability...

To its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.

Not Stalin’s and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination.  Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.”

Hannah Arendt

 

After an initial rally attempt, stocks headed south, going out near the lows. 

Gold and silver were under pressure most of the day. 

The miners were taken out and beaten down to the lows. 

There will be a stock index option expiration on Friday. 

Please remember Tony Sanders of Confounded Interest in your thoughts and prayers. 

He is in the hospital with Covid 19.   Yesterday was touch and go, but today he seems to be responding well to treatment.   We have come a long way in the last 10 months.

Please be mindful of the seriousness of these things, despite the nonsense that is being spread about the pandemic, among other things, by the well-meaning, ideologues, and opportunists.

Have a pleasant evening.